Capitol puts a Kid A player on eBay for the Milarepa Fund

Capitol, Radiohead's American label, is auctioning one of its Kid A advance players on eBay for the Milarepa Fund. The player is a Sony MC-P10 Music Clip, a pencil-shaped MP3 player not yet in the shops, with the whole album on it. Bidding closes on 21 September, and the winner gets Kid A before it comes out at the start of October.

The Milarepa Fund is the Beastie Boys' charity behind the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. Radiohead have played two of them, in New York in June 1997 and at RFK Stadium in Washington in June 1998.

The Music Clip is how Capitol has been sending Kid A to American writers, radio programmers and retailers. The band and the label told Steve Hochman of the Los Angeles Times in August that the move was born of necessity, to keep perfect digital copies off Napster until the album was in the shops. Its files are encoded so they cannot be copied or sent over the internet. Each one costs more than $200, and writers working on reviews and features only borrow them.

For OK Computer the label had sent cassettes sealed inside portable tape players with the cases glued shut, so the album had to be heard in one go.